UREx Sustainability Research Network

UREx Sustainability Research Network

2017 All Hands Meeting

Join researchers from the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) alongside practitioners, government representatives, and environmental justice leaders from 10 United States and Latin American cities who will share progress, challenges, and needs for building resilience to climate change in cities.
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The Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) focuses on integrating social, ecological, and technical systems to devise, analyze, and support urban infrastructure decisions in the face of climatic uncertainty.

Working with an initial 9 UREx network cities — six continental U.S. and three Latin American, home to over 35 million residents – and ultimately an expanded network of cities, we aim to co-create a novel set of decision-support tools that confront these resiliency challenges and put cities on a path to sustainable futures.

Challenges & Solutions

The Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) focuses on integrating social, ecological, and technical systems to devise, analyze, and support urban infrastructure decisions in the face of climatic uncertainty.

Climate change is widely considered to be one of the biggest challenges to global sustainability. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, extreme events are likely to increase in frequency. Weather-related extreme events are the most immediate way that people experience climate change and urban areas are particularly vulnerable to such events, given their location, concentration of people, and increasingly complex and interdependent infrastructures.

The current infrastructure of urban areas is aging and proving inadequate for protecting city populations. Infrastructure must be resilient, provide ecosystem services, improve social well-being, and exploit new technologies in ways that benefit all segments of urban populations and are appropriate to the particular urban context.

Supported by the National Science Foundation under award number SES-1444755. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.